PolicyPak Cloud and PolicyPak OnPremise – Together using PPCloud Licenses

PolicyPak Cloud and PolicyPak OnPremise – Together using PPCloud Licenses

You get a free “on premise” license when you consume a PolicyPak Cloud license. Here is a demonstration video to show you a best practice way to set up PolicyPak cloud AND PolicyPak on-premise together.

PolicyPak Cloud and PolicyPak OnPremise – Together using PPCloud Licenses

Hi. This is Jeremy Moskowitz, Group Policy MVP and Founder of PolicyPak Software. In this video, I’m going to show you how you can use PolicyPak Cloud licenses with your existing PolicyPak on-premise machines. Very easy to do.

To get started, this is PolicyPak Cloud. You have probably been here before if you’re a PolicyPak Cloud trailer or customer. The basic idea is that there are “Computer Groups,” and by default we put four XML files and linked them over to the “All” group where all computers would go.

If you’re planning on doing this onsite, my recommendation is after you get a feel for what these items do, you can just go ahead and unlink these XML data files from the “All” group (“Unlink XML Data file from Computer Group”). We’ll talk about that in just a second.

My next suggestion then would be for “Company Groups.” I would add two groups (“Add company group”). I would call one maybe “On-Prem Machines” and then create another company group called “Roaming Computers (out in the field).” Something that’s meaningful to you. Something that represents that these are two completely different types of machines.

Then what we’ll do is really the same thing on both of our machine types. This machine is not domain-joined at all. Just to prove a point here, if I were to right click and go to “System” here, you see he’s not even domain-joined.

Let me go ahead and install the “PolicyPak Cloud Client” here. Obviously, this guy is not going to get Group Policy. The only way he would get directives is through PolicyPak Cloud, and we’ve just taken away all those directives so there are no directives for him right now at all. He’s going to go ahead and sync with the cloud, try to download any directives. There aren’t any.

We’ll give him some in a minute, and then we’ll do the same thing for our other machine in just a second. Again, he joins the “All” group, and he’s also “Unassigned.” A whole lot of nothing is going to happen at this point because, again, he has no directives.

Let’s go over to our domain-joined “Group Policy going-to-get” kind of guy computer here. We’re going to again install the “PolicyPak Cloud Client,” which includes the PolicyPak Client Side Extension. The key point here is that because you’ve paid a little extra for the Cloud Client and the cloud service, you get an implied on-premise license automatically. You don’t need to additionally license your on-premise machine. The Cloud Client license covers your machine on-premise automatically.

This machine, even though it’s domain joined, is going to do exactly the same thing as the non-domain joined machine, which is what? It’s going to join the “All” group and get a whole lot of nothing because we haven’t told it to get any directives yet.

What I would do next is go back to my “Computer Groups” here. Now that both of these computers are joined, let’s take a look. For my “On-Prem Machines,” let’s go ahead and assign a computer to this group (“Assign Computers to Group”). If I “Find” all the computers here, you’ll see that there are the two computers. Here’s “Win7Computer-32.” That’s the domain-joined one. I’m going to “Add” him to the “On­-Premise Machines.” The “Roaming Computers (out in the field),” that’s the one I’m going to take for my “Win8Pro” computer that’s not domain-joined.

Now that I’ve partitioned which machine is in which group, I can basically make this very easy on myself. For the “Roaming Computers (out in the field),” I can use cloud-based items. I can “Link XML Data to Computer Group.” If I look for my “(example)” items here and I want to pick the for-example items – one of them is a shortcut that shows you on the desktop – I’m just talking about right now still the non-domain-joined machine here.

If I then run “ppupdate,” what it’s going to do is take a look out to the cloud and see what has changed. Just like that, you can see that we got the items that were linked because my computer is in the “Roaming Computers (out in the field)” group and it gets these cloud-based items.

What about the on-premise machines? Now is where you just get to do exactly what you’ve seen in lots of the other videos. Just use the on-premise stuff. It’s just that easy. You are already licensed. For instance, if I want to go to my “East Sales Users” here and “Manage Winzip” and do this all using regular Group Policy, you can do that. We go to user side, “PolicyPak/Application Manager” here.

It’s true, you do have to install this piece, the Admin console, on your own machine, but that’s free. There’s nothing to license there.

If we want to do WinZip settings and make this “51” and check all four of these checkboxes and do some configurations here, that’s all great. Now that that’s locked and loaded inside Group Policy, it doesn’t matter. I don’t have any licenses in on-premise. I don’t need them because the “Cloud Client” embraces that license.

If I take a look and now run “GP Update,” I’m going to get this information from Group Policy because I’m already licensed in the cloud. Let’s go ahead and download the GPOs, which are not cloud. This is just coming straight from Policy-land, not cloud. Then if I just double click “WinZip” here just to prove a point, go to “Options/Configuration,” go to “Passwords,” you can see my configurations are there.

The key point of what I’ve done here is that if I go back to “License Status,” you can see “2” “Consumed licenses”: one for my computer that’s non-domain-joined and roaming and one for my computer that is domain-joined and on-premise.

Then what I did was I created “Computer Groups”: one computer group for “On-Prem Machines.” And, yeah, when you join the cloud service, you’ll have to move them to the right group so that way they won’t get any cloud-based directives if they’re “On-Prem Machines” and they will get cloud directives if you want them to because they’re “Roaming Computers (out in the field).”

Hopefully, this shed some light on how to comingle cloud licenses and use them for real, true machines that are out in the field and roaming and in the cloud and even those that you’re using on-premise. If you have questions about this, please post to the forums and we’ll be happy to help you out.